Column: Fight ramps up to keep voters away from bailout bill

Sunday

Voters may be surprised to know that Ohio’s anti-tax, Republican-run legislature imposed a new tax on Ohio’s electricity customers in July — House Bill 6, the FirstEnergy Solutions bailout bill.

That’s what Akron-based FirstEnergy Solutions, HB 6’s chief beneficiary, claims in a lawsuit filed last week in the Ohio Supreme Court. And if the high court agrees with FirstEnergy Solutions, that would deny Ohio voters any chance to vote HB 6 up or down at the ballot box because the state constitution forbids a statewide referendum on tax legislation.

The Ohio House vote to approve the HB 6 bailout was 51-38 — just one more than the 50 required; the Senate vote was 19-12, two votes more than required. And the bill’s supporters denied that it was a tax measure — then. Instead, the bill’s backers said it will let two non-air-polluting nuclear power plants, Perry and Davis-Besse, on Lake Erie, keep generating. Without subsidies, the plants’ comparatively costly electricity can’t compete with electricity generated by natural gas.

Result: Through 2026, HB 6 imposes a monthly charge of 85 cents (the residential rate) on all Ohio electricity customers — not just FirstEnergy customers. And through 2030, HB 6 imposes a monthly charge of $1.50 (also a residential rate) on electricity customers to subsidize two coal-burning power plants (one in Indiana) owned by Ohio Valley Electric Corp., which is owned by a group of utilities.

HB 6 fans say, and the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission confirms, HB 6 could represent a net monthly savings to customers because HB 6 prunes what have been Ohio’s requirements for renewable energy and energy efficiency. That’s penny-wise and pound-foolish, because, in plain English, that will shrink Ohio’s market for nonpolluting solar and wind energy.

The LSC's analysts reported that the combination of HB 6 fees, offset by the reduction or elimination of other fees, would, through 2026, reduce by $3.52 the monthly bill of an AEP Ohio residential customer. Beginning in 2027, the monthly savings would become $4.37 for that same customer.

You’d think that would make HB 6 an easy sell if Ohioans get to vote on it in 2020. But it isn’t an easy sell. A July 8 headline in The Bond Buyer, the bible of the bond market, might help explain why: “FirstEnergy nuclear bailout would be a win for bondholders” — that is, for Wall Street. Evidently, the supposed risk-takers of the stock and bond markets aren’t risk-takers at all. Instead of risks, they prefer sure things — and the Ohio General Assembly evidently thinks that’s what those speculators deserve.

The Ohio Supreme Court lawsuit was filed by a lawyer regarded as one of Ohio’s most capable, John W. Zeiger of the Zeiger, Tigges & Little law firm of Columbus. Meanwhile, a group of HB 6 opponents, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, is gathering the roughly 266,000 signatures of registered voters from at least half the state’s counties required to place HB 6 on 2020’s ballot — a “referendum.”

Evidently, that’s the last thing FirstEnergy Solutions wants. The best known recent example of a referendum on a General Assembly-passed bill was in 2011, when voters (62% to 38%) killed Senate Bill 5, a bill backed by then-Gov. John Kasich to gut public employee unions.

As previously noted, those who support HB 6 have suggested that anyone who signs the referendum petitions of Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts would be assisting the Chinese government and Communist Party in a (supposed) quest to corner Ohio’s natural gas market. What’s next? Space aliens?

The Statehouse claims and counterclaims about HB 6 call to mind what poet Carl Sandburg had a lawyer say in Sandburg’s poem, “The People, Yes”: “If the law is against you, talk about the evidence … If the evidence is against you talk about the law.”

Could be that those anti-referendum “the-Chinese-are-coming” ads haven’t kept voters from signing petitions to put HB 6 on Ohio’s statewide ballot. Maybe that’s why FirstEnergy Solutions wants Ohio’s utility-friendly Supreme Court (5-2 Republican) to keep HB 6 off the ballot: If you can’t scare voters, maybe you can get a court to deny them a chance to check and balance their legislature.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. tsuddes@gmail.com

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